


Transgressions

by Eatgreass



Category: Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Trans Victor Frankenstein, creature creation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 04:21:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29878992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eatgreass/pseuds/Eatgreass
Summary: There is power inherent in controlling a body.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	Transgressions

There is power inherent in controlling a body, the way you move the arms and feel the waist and place a smile on stone-cold lips. There is power in something Victoria has never been able to do, not truly. Not now. 

So piece by piece, by the painful journey he has never truly reconciled with the doll-skin and bright eyes, Victoria builds himself a body of flesh and blood that he can believe in. (This is years before his fateful monster. Victoria will build himself before he wields his power on another.)

Victoria changes his name to Victor. Victor moves to a place where nobody will know him, and where nobody will question the scars that lace his chest, on the rare occasion that he is beholden to be seen. A place where the family he has accepts him and the people that didn’t are gone. A place where he can trace the lines on his own body without fear, without pain, without  _ expectation.  _

Victor hates himself, but not for the reasons one might think. He has built himself a place where people give him credit for his crimes, and not crucifixion for the blasphemous act of existing as he wishes to. The whispers on the streets speak more of the mad, mysterious man who locks himself in an attic to make mockery of heaven than of the poor, frightened girl that was kept away from the world without consent. 

Victor wants more. Though he has been treated well, though he has shed the snakeskin of his past life, he knows his own body will never be a flawless temple. He cannot worship at the throne of an imperfect soul, and the imperfect body only serves to pull him back to reverie he would sooner forsake. 

He has been many nights crying, begging a god that was as cold as the snow on the windowsill to fix him. He has spent many hours plotting in his study for something that he should not have been able to conceive of.

Victor digs up a grave.

Bodies are awful, festering things, full of maggots and worms and whatever else creeps inside while the occupant is otherwise engaged. Bodies are an obligation to uphold, and they are a piano that has long since lost the sound it was ordained for, shrieking at the whims of any man who uses it. 

The cadavers that Victor has chosen are none of these things. 

There is a beautiful young woman with a slice across her throat, dead eyed and staring with ivory skin into the blackness of the night. Her hips hold a consummate hourglass, and Victor wants none of it. He does not think on the horror of what he is doing, as her rigor-mortis smile follows him back to his lab. 

There is a man that Victor had taken once, kissed deep and hard by the edge of the river. His eyes are closed now, and he died only three days previously, but this man is no Jesus. The jawline is strong and the hair is so dark and thin it might well be a relic of raven feathers. 

Victor shudders as he digs up what he promises is the last of the corpses. Cadavers, he tells himself, but that does not absolve the guilt, and it itches against his skin, rough sandpaper transgressions. 

The third is a child of no more than three. The beauty of the child is beyond compare, and if Victor is to break the laws of nature so brazenly, then he must not be mediocre. 

He shudders when he examines the slaughterhouse, pulling out bits of pig and cow and goat, and knowing all the same that he is exactly what they are. Just another piece of meat to be ground into pulp and fed to those who will never think of what is sustaining them. Still, the stomach of a cow is much stronger than that of a human, and this creation will be immaculate. There is no room for error, human or otherwise. 

And Victor builds. It is slow at first, and Victor works deep into the night, his eyes rimmed crimson and bloody. The rumors only grow from there, and Victor is content to let the town stew in their ignorance of his workings. He will, one day, control a body, even if it is not his own. 

Victor does not start with the skin. There is a common misconception that when building the creature, Victor built from the outside, ever working his way inwards to the ever so delicate parts of flesh. No, first came the formaldehyde. 

It was dangerous, the hours Victor spent in his lab with nothing but a monster on the table to keep him company, his nose and mouth burning from the putrid chemicals he used to preserve viscera. 

Mistake after mistake never put him off of his fateful task, for if God had misstepped in the creation of Victor, Victor’s blundering mistakes could easily be forgiven. 

He did not pray anymore. Victor relinquished the hand of a God that had placed him in an unfit body. Victor was now the creator, Victor was a god, and damn the whispers that daily assaulted his ears. 

It was many nights, many days, thousands of hours spent in the embrace of cool steel walls, but he built a human.

And when he saw it, the tears threatened to spill out of his eyes and mar the skin of that ravishing woman with a slit throat on the day he had exhumed her. 

Not tears of happiness, and yet they were not grief filled either. No, Victor would not weep for a humanlike being that had not yet been given a soul. He sobbed for himself, for all that he wished he was and all that he had created in that stubbornness. Perhaps it was relief, perhaps fear. Emotions are complex at the best of times. 

Regardless of the sentiment he harbored, Victor flicked the switch and gave life to the thing he had built. 

The first minute was joy. Victor was a god among men, and this was nothing less than weeks of difficult work compounded. But when Victor looked at the figure, truly looked at it, as the chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm, he wilted under the pressure he had set for himself. The skin was pale and wan, a patchwork quilt of colors that were not meant to appear on a human face. The blue blood swam beneath the skin and gave off the appearance of a muddy lake. The lips were abnormally red, a rose rich boat in the middle of a storm. Though the eyelids fluttered with a grace that Victor had barely seen on a human visage, the eyes underneath were a shock of blue, as if the very electricity he had used to bring the creature to life had sunk into its veins and melted there irreversibly. And the hair. The hair was so carefully chosen, from a man that Victor had professed to know, but it was unkempt, framing the face of what he had created. A mockery of a man he had cared for, and a sign of humanity on a person Victor so much now wanted to believe was not his own. 

But Victor had created this thing, so when the eyes of the creature fluttered open, Victor sat silent, measuring the same amount of grace that his creation seemed to have. 

There is power inherent in controlling a body. There is power in something Victor has never been able to do, not truly. Not now. 

Tracing lines over your own skin is one kind of ecstasy, seeing where the scars end and where the person begins, and creating these scars on another is something else entirely. Victor does not control a body. He does not control his own body, and he certainly does not control the body of the thing sat before him.

**Author's Note:**

> Hmm, I know that there are transphobic implications in making Victor trans but I will be looking away because I am simply a transmasc that wants to explore this concept.


End file.
